Article

Shelf-front kiosks combat information overload

Ultra-compact kiosks and displays allow retailers to dispense product information and collect loyalty data on shelves. Electronic pricing labels shrink the displays even more, replacing the conventional price tag. We take a closer look.

August 14, 2005 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

Choice is a good thing. Human beings want to make their own choices, on matters both magnificent and mundane. It stands to reason that having more options, therefore, is always better.

But that doesn't appear to be true. In his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, psychology professor Barry Schwartz raises the notion that having a few choices makes us happy, but there is a breaking point at which having too many options is actually discouraging.

"My neighborhood supermarket is not a particularly large store, and yet next to the crackers were 285 varieties of cookies," Schwartz writes. "Among chocolate chip cookies, there were 21 options. Among Goldfish (I don't know whether to count them as cookies or crackers), there were 20 different varieties to choose from." And that's just the beginning of his laundry list of choices that must be made on even the simplest trip through the average American grocery.

Retailers know this, and struggle with ways to offer a worthwhile array of products without daunting their customers. Increasingly, electronic devices are employed to deliver information and create product differentiation in the mind of the consumer.

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Buy this, not that

A well-established kiosk application is the price look-up unit, usually mounted on a pole or end-cap. According to Nick Daddabbo, senior product manager forSkaneateles Falls, N.Y.-basedHand Held Products, there is no reason these devices cannot do much more than merely dispense prices - he said other great applications include inventory look-up, store mapping and wayfinding, loyalty card tracking, on-screen marketing and cross-selling.

"The opportunity to put multiple types of key buying information at the customer's fingertips is really what makes these applications `killer,'" he said.

Hand Held's Image Kiosk unit does all of these things, and also can be modified to dispense custom coupons with the addition of a small form-factor printer. The units are built on the Windows CE.Net platform, which Daddabbo also said is key, given the need to tightly integrate with existing store networks.

"We believe that the Windows CE.Net platform will actually ease integration," he said. "Most retailers have Windows programmers on the integration team, and if not, there are many Windows programming resources out there."

NCR also has had great success helping retailers put interactive information at the shelf. Camelia Del Valle, product manager for the NCR EasyPoint Mini kiosk, said shelf-front kiosks in Food Lion's Bloom stores average 100 "hits" per day. The product recently was upgraded, she said, to allow high-quality multimedia graphics on an 8.4-inch diagonal touchscreen.

Limited shelf space

The difficult part of this proposition is, of course, convincing retailers to give up even a few inches of shelf space, one of their most precious commodities.

More research on these key terms: Retail Product information Pricing

"Retailers, just like everyone, are going to ask `What's in it for me?'" said Michael Clark, retail consultant and owner of Retail Results. "Manufacturers and designers are going to have to convince retailers that the kiosk will increase the bottom line or drive more traffic into the store, or both. The kiosk is going to have to fill a need that isn't currently being met."

Or, perhaps, a need that isn't being met very well: As products become more complex, keeping employees sufficiently trained to answer questions becomes increasingly difficult. Product-info kiosks can answer those questions, freeing up employees for other tasks and reducing the training burden.

Shrinking the price, literally

The shelf-front motif doesn't strictly benefit the shopper - one innovative use will be an enormous boon to the retailer from an operational standpoint.

NCR's RealPrice system is one example of wireless "electronic shelf labels," as small as a conventional price tag that sits below a product on a shelf. Each comes with an LCD display that shows the current price, along with teaser info ("Save $1.99," for instance).

Store managers - either within the store or from a remote location - can manage pricing for every product in the store, and make changes instantly. The price database is shared with checkout, so customer frustration from incorrect prices is greatly reduced - as are the many hours of labor needed to make updates with a manual system.

Jeff Peterson, product line director for NCR RealPrice, said that there are roughly 300 retailers using electronic shelf labels worldwide, and of those, about 100 use the RealPrice product. NCR estimates ROI for the system to be as little as 12 months.

Clark said that electronic shelf labels present tremendous opportunities for large retailers, particularly grocery stores since they frequently run specials and make discounting decisions based on inventory fluctuations.

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